Here's a quote which hits me every now and then (in the train, the bathroom, driving, ordering food, etc.), "I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel."

Beautiful, right? It's by Gloria Naylor.

When I talk about my "favorite" authors, I mean the ones whose books I will try not to miss, the ones whose perspectives and writing style I challenge myself to embrace and internalise. Gloria Naylor is such a writer for me. The first book I read from this African-American novelist was Bailey's Cafe. Maybe it was because when a friend of mine handed it to me I thought, "Aw shucks, another boring 300 pages I'm socially obligated to sit through..." and so when the book exploded through to me it felt like the best thing I've read for years. Or maybe it was so damn surreal yet real in its stories of Negroes suffering in the early 20th century, from slavery, poverty, discrimination, issues I know next to nothing about. I've since read Mama Day (which contains shades of the atonement), The Women (and Men) of Brewster Place, and Linden Hills. Toldcha she was one of my "favorites".

And then there's Arundathi Royand her Booker-prize winning story. I recall she won it on my first year at work. John Updike got it spot on when he said that breakthroughts in literature necessarily invent their own language, an apt description of what The God of Small Things accomplished, as with this oft-quoted line from the book, "They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."

Most recently, I've come to be enamoured by the way Frederica Mathewes-Greenwrites. She was one of five heay-weights trading/challenging views in The Church in Emerging Culture: 5 Perspectives. Whilst she certainly wasn't the "big fish" in the pond (this accolade for the book would have to go to Brian McLaren and Michael Horton, in that order), she was undoubtedly the wittiest and most subversive. Her essay, refreshingly titled "Under the Heaventree", was written in Q&A format and contained a phrase I will never forget. It encompasses what I look for in writers/thinkers and explains why the three women in this blog are a trio I'd recommend for one and all to favor: